So, the hottest day of the year so far. The swollen spectre of Summer has been gold-guilding the pages of this blog quite a lot recently, with all sorts of sun-high stripped down beachy pop songs crawling out of heavy draped bedrooms and into the leafy light. One of our favourites, Ryan Schmale’s That Ghost , however, is content to stay cocooned and entombed in the warm sweatered womb of Winter, cold-sweating as he is with fevered sick-bed melodies such as those found asleep well past noon on “All Winter.” “All Summer, no Winter, I’m doing no better” Schmale intones in such a pallid way as to drowsily elevate the song to new brilliantly bored plateaus of slacker-dom: this is a song that doesn’t even want to loaf around on some golden coast somewhere, simply because getting there would be too much effort. Not all downcast doom and greysky gloom though, and for all his imploring, Schmale can’t completely keep the sunshine out of a song that seems warmly infectious in a way that it almost begrudges itself for.

That Ghost – All Winter